Faculty » Sally Ann Ness

Sally Ann Ness is a full time faculty member in the Department of Anthropology. She has worked in urban provincial centers in the Philippines as well as in Indonesia and the United States. Her research has focused on various forms of symbolic action, both in the practice of everyday life and in extraordinary ritual and secular performances. She has written on the semiotics of festival life, dance, and sport, as well as on tourism development and its consequences for cultural practice and cultural identity. Her current research, funded in part by a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, focuses on choreographic aspects of Visitor practice in Yosemite National Park, drawing in part on the work of Gregory Bateson to illuminate connections between place, embodiment, and motility.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: Migrations of Gesture (2008 with co-editor Carrie Noland); Where Asia Smiles; an Ethnography of Philippine Tourism (2002); Body, Movement, and Culture; Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (1992); Bali, the Camera, and Dance; the Lost Legacy of the Mead-Bateson Collaboration, Journal of Asian Studies (2008); Choreographies of Tourism in Yosemite Valley, Performance Research (2007); Tourism/Terrorism; the Landscaping of Consumption and the Darker Side of Place, American Ethnologist (2005); Originality in the Postcolony; Choreographing the Neo-ethnic Body in Philippine Concert Dance, Cultural Anthropology (1997); Dancing in the Field; Notes from Memory, Corporealities (Susan L. Foster, ed. 1996); When Seeing is Believing; The Changing Role of Visuality in a Philippine Dance, Anthropological Quarterly (1995).